By Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, United States senator from New York
Thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents made public on Monday show a company whose own employees question its roles in the spread of dangerous content and calls to violence. As NBC News reported on the staff communications, “Facebook’s well-documented problems in abetting violent polarization and encouraging the spread of misinformation weren’t getting fixed, despite the company’s investments and promises.”
It’s clear that government action is needed. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who came forward with documents exposing the company’s knowledge of the harm its products were causing, gave powerful testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month. During her remarks, she called for the creation of a federal regulatory agency where people like her could serve a tour of duty after working in tech and bring their expertise to the world of oversight and regulation.
She rightly pointed out that “right now the only people in the world who are trained to … understand what’s happening inside of Facebook are people who grew up inside of Facebook, or Pinterest, or another social media company.”
The government’s regulation and enforcement capabilities have not kept pace as algorithms have evolved and data collection has grown from simple cookie tracking to extensive surveillance of individuals and communities. Even just a decade ago, we weren’t carrying smartphones in our pockets that knew everything about where we go, whom we talk to, and what we do — not to mention our heart rate, our step count and even our tone of voice.
In other words, our days weren’t being continually subdivided into bits of data that could be bought and sold. That shift, brought about by Facebook and other big tech companies, represents a huge threat to our privacy that the government must address. To meet the challenge, we need more than a bureau within the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that draws its authority from a law passed in 1914, as some in Congress are pushing. That bureau would be a reactive, not a proactive body. Haugen is right: We need a federal agency whose sole focus is safeguarding Americans' personal data and civil liberties.
My legislation, the Data Protection Act, would create that agency, as well as a comprehensive data rights framework that can protect individual and collective privacy. Having a Data Protection Agency (DPA) would give our government the ability to not only evolve alongside the biggest companies in tech, but go toe-to-toe with them in the fight for privacy. Right now, the United States is one of few democracies, and one of the only members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, without such an agency.
The approach companies like Facebook take to data is motivated not by protecting our privacy but by growing their profit and power. The more that businesses or organizations know about you, the more power they have to target, influence and manipulate you. That power, especially when in the hands of bad actors, is extremely dangerous and capable of creating new, unexpected forms of injustice.
These threats are already in motion. Haugen’s whistleblowing and The Wall Street Journal’s subsequent Facebook Files investigation outlined, among many issues, how Instagram and its parent company Facebook have ignored the mental health crisis their product and algorithm is creating among teen girls. We see the same patterns across other social networks like YouTube, whose drive to keep people on the platform led to a data-based algorithm that fed viewers videos of conspiracy theories and extremist content. (YouTube has said it’s working to address these issues, though it has also disputed some of the methodologies used to reach these conclusions.)
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